My hexapod has an autonomous mode and a remote controlled mode. In the autonomous mode it can track an IR light source using the WiiCamera sensor and avoid obstacles which it detects with 2 ultrasonic sensors. In the remote controlled mode I can let it walk in every direction. I also have a mode to move the body without moving the tips of the legs, this is where inverse kinematic comes in very handy. I also programmed a "fitness mode" where the hexapod lift 3 legs of the ground and moves them up. In the last mode I can control each leg individually, you can see this in the last part of the video. My code is far from perfect, but it works It was not easy to program all these things and let it all work together.

I reused the remote control (based on an Uno, joystick shield and nRF24L01 module) from previous projects. This project cost me quite a bit of money. During the building of Bajdupod 996R one servo burned up. Yes only one, I can assure you these servos have had a very hard time. So I am quite surprised that I did not burn up more servos.

Quite a bit of time and money was spent on powering this hungry beast. I initially used 2 8A UBECs and killed them pretty fast. Then I bought 3 more 8A UBECs and designed a new power servo PCB. Then I destroyed a 3S 3000mAh Lipo battery. I had to recharge the battery so many times that the Lipo charger died on me. Luckily I had 2. The hexapod eats Lipo's for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The battery lasts less then 10 minutes.

Coding this beast has taken up most of my free time the last couple of months. I would have never thought I would be able to program such a complex project one year ago. I have only been playing with Arduino for one year and a halve, before that I had never written a line of code. I've never taken any programming courses, everything I've learned comes mainly from lots of trying and testing. I can assure you it took me lots of dedication and hard work to accomplish what you see in the above video

The only code I had was the math for the inverse kinematics. Which actually is not that hard, there are lots of websites that explain how it works. My biggest problem was coding the walking gait. I first wrote a sketch using a for loop and the delay function to move the servos. That was pretty easy. But when you want the micro controller to do a bunch of other things you're in trouble. So I tried dozens of ways to code the gait using the millis timer, after a dozen revisions of my code I finally got it right.I did look at the Lynxmotion code before I built my hexapod, but it's pretty complex. I can't understand much of it.I name it a monster because it uses so much current. I once tried to power it without the UBECs, and connected the servos directly to my lab power supply. I saw the current shoot up to almost 20A. I'm using very cheap metal geared servos (standard size), Towardpro MG996r servos. They cost less then 5€ a piece and have +10kg/cm torque.

I was thinking of using a Lynxmotion SSC-32 Servo Controller, at least that should give all the basic walking and gait control and for $40 I save probably months of work and can get on with more interesting (to me anyway) stuff.

Yes the Lynxmotion servo controller is good solution. I actually have a Chinese (Torobot) 32 channel servo controller. I plan on rewriting my code one day using it. It should be much easier to make the servos move smoothly with those controllers.